A class action lawsuit filed in California puts Apple, Adobe, and Intel at the center of a pay-limiting scheme to keep employees wages down.

The suit comes in the wake of a 2009 investigation by the United States Department of Justice that charged the companies with "agreeing to not cold call each other's employees in order to extend job offers" according to PC World.

The new suit, brought by Siddharth Hariharan (former software engineer for Lucasfilm, puts Apple in the driver's seat of the conspiracy. "Every agreement alleged herein directly involved a company either controlled by Apple's CEO, or a company that shared a member of its board of directors with Apple," the suit said.

The companies are charged with violating unfair competition and anitrust laws for making agreements to keep employee compensation artificially low as well as getting rid of competition among the defendants for skilled labor according to the suit.

While there may be some merit to the claims of Hariharan and the previous investigation by the DOJ, it will be tough to succeed with a class-action lawsuit without physical evidence (emails, documents, recorded conversation) of the implied conspiracy. It would be unfortunate, if found true, that these extremely profitable and highly regarded companies are short changing the individuals directly responsible for the companies success. Sure Steve Jobs is a visionary, but he doesn't program everything and come up with each game changing idea by himself.